The present invention relates to a storing apparatus such as hard disk drive, optical disk drive, or the like which is connected to information processing equipment such as computer, word processor, electronic book, or the like and to a password control method. More particularly, the invention relates to a storing apparatus for protecting an access of information recorded on a medium by a password and relates to its password control method.
Hitherto, in a storing apparatus such as hard disk drive, optical disk drive, or the like, data recorded on a medium is protected by using a password. That is, an identification confirmation is performed by a password so that only a specific person is authorized to read and write data from/to the medium of the storing apparatus and the other persons are not allowed to access to the data. For example, a password is preliminarily written and stored in a storing apparatus or a storage medium. When the user inputs his password at the time of using the storing apparatus and the password inputted by the user and the password stored on the apparatus side coincide with each other, a write command or a read command to the storing medium is accepted. When the passwords do not coincide, the write or read command is not accepted and an error is returned. A system of authorizing a person by the password as mentioned above is not limited to the access protection of the storing apparatus but is used in many cases such as a use of a terminal apparatus in a data communication system and the like. The protection system using the password is widely used since a predetermined effect can be expected although it is a technique which can be easily employed.
Since the access protection using the password as mentioned above is widely used, however, an individual user has a number of passwords and it is often difficult to remember all of the passwords. When the user forgets the password which is used by himself, there is a problem such that even the authorized user cannot access. There is, accordingly, a way of use such that the user records the password in a notebook or the like and confirms the password in the notebook each time the apparatus is used. This results in a problem such that the password is known by stealingly seeing the notebook of the user. In the access protection using the password, since it is presumed that the user is urged to input the password every access, a third party such as a colleague of the user's place of work has many chances to see the password. Those problems are problems accompanied by the operation which always requires an input of a password when the apparatus is used. A technique which can further reduce the frequency of inputting the password by the user while performing the access protection by the password is demanded. As a method of solving the problem, a method of stopping the access protection by the password by eliminating the password at an arbitrary use time point and newly setting a password when the access protection is necessary can be considered. That is, it is a method of setting a password only for a period of time in which the protection is necessary and receiving the access protection. The method has, however, the following problems. First, when a password is set again, the user often sets a password different from the previous password, so that a password management becomes complicated. That is, the user is likely to forget the newest password. Second, there is a danger that a third party steals a glance at a scene when the user resets the password.